Inaugural

I started blogging about the history of my hometown, Wolverton, over two years ago. I hardly knew what I was doing when I began, nor indeed if anyone else would be interested. I did stick with it and there have been some consequences:

• the readership has grown and continues to grow since I began to track it;
• I have become more interested in my roots and in history generally
• I have become more attracted to, maybe even addicted to blogging

Today I have decided to expand my interest to the whole North Bucks area and write what I can about it. When I was a boy the Milton Keynes area was still mostly rural, with a few small towns and even smaller villages and I could cycle along many of the country roads without meeting a car. Schools were very small and working on a farm was still a viable (if not very well paid) occupation.

In the last 50 years the transformation has been massive. I'm not going to sit in judgement, nor would I like to pretend that the time before Milton Keynes represented a kind of golden age. I have always been in favour of progress, so I am not going to start knocking it now.

However, our past is of interest, and in a perverse way the very creation of Milton Keynes has generated more interest in the past. I doubt whether Bancroft Villa, for example, would have been discovered if the area had been bypassed for development. my aim is to  record what I can about the pre-Milton Keynes era - a long time of course - everything up to 1970 will be included in this ragbag of musings.

The Wolverton Past blog will continue.